benign

Even a seemingly benign downgrade — from “honorable” to “general discharge under honorable conditions” — makes a difference.

In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Elizabeth Bruenig wrote for the Washington Post that Halloween “gets its depth and intrigue from the layering of things that seem frightening but are really benign — toothy jack-o’-lanterns, ghoulish costumes, tales of ghosts and witches and monsters — atop things that seem benign but are really frightening, such as the passage of the harvest season into the long, cold dark.”

By bonding, the medicine transforms the reactive metals into benign molecules that have little interest in interacting with different compounds in the body.

A second Trump term wouldn’t be a benign rerun of the first version.

Most types of E. coli bacteria are benign, and even a healthy part of our digestive system.